French · Intermediate
Read La Porte étroite in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: Strait Is the Gate
André Gide · 1909
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
La Porte étroite by André Gide was first published in 1909. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 38,500 words.
He loves her with all his heart. She loves him too, and that is what frightens her.
Every summer, young Jérôme spends the holidays with his uncle Bucolin at Fongueusemare, a quiet house with a walled garden near Le Havre. There he grows up beside his cousins, and falls deeply in love with the eldest, Alissa: gentle, serious and two years older than he is.
Alissa returns his love. But one Sunday in church, the pastor reads Christ's words: “Strive to enter in at the strait gate.” For Alissa, the narrow path to God seems to leave little room for earthly happiness. As the years pass, through long letters, family secrets and the hopes of her lively sister Juliette, the two cousins circle a marriage everyone expects, and that Alissa keeps putting off.
Strait Is the Gate is André Gide's most moving novel, a story of love and self-denial that closes with pages from Alissa's own secret journal.
- Author
- André Gide
- First published
- 1909
- Language
- French
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 38,500 words
How it opens
D’autres en auraient pu faire un livre ; mais l’histoire que je raconte ici, j’ai mis toute ma force à la vivre et ma vertu s’y est usée. J’écrirai donc très simplement mes souvenirs, et, s’ils sont en lambeaux par endroits, je n’aurai recours à aucune invention pour les rapiécer ou les joindre ; l’effort que j’apporterais à leur apprêt gênerait le dernier plaisir que j’espère trouver à les dire.
Reading La Porte étroite in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in French. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday French feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
